For reasons that aren’t worth getting into, this week I found myself on the phone for 30 minutes with an insurance broker. It was time for new home and auto policies.

In the age of automated everything, talking on the phone with my new friend Brad felt positively quaint: we kibbitzed a bit, he talked about how different insurance companies work, we commiserated about a terrible weekend for Chicago sports teams. All the stuff you don’t get from a chatbot. It was nice.

In order to prepare a quote with comparable coverage to what we have now, Brad asked me about our existing policies. Thank God, these aren’t documents I have really had much occasion to look at. Upon inspection, I was struck by the language they use to describe an accident or other kind of event: it’s referred to as a “peril.” Fire, theft, tornadoes—they’re all perils.

Now, it’s not like you and I haven’t heard of that word. (I remember playing a Batman video game with my kids where you got points for saving a “citizen in peril.” Even kids know what peril is.) But it’s not really a word we tend to use in everyday speech. And it got me thinking about what it might have to tell us about the meaning of home.

Most fundamentally, perhaps, we might think of home as a place that is generally free from peril. Not entirely free, of course—that’s why we have insurance policies (which, by the way, I would argue are one of the great advances of human civilization, no joke). But generally, home is a place free from peril.

But that’s also a pretty minimalist definition. And it’s probably not a description of home so much as a definition of a different, related word: refuge. While refuge is necessary for home, it isn’t sufficient. Home is something more: warmer, more rooted, more long-term. Refuge is the most basic, elemental freedom from a violent world—and it is meant to be temporary, a waystation en route to a more durable sense of home.

Which brings us to Noah’s Ark, the archetype of refuge. Seeing that “the earth is filled with lawlessness”—which the Midrash describes as the utter breakdown of any sense of privacy or dignity—God tells Noah to make an ark in order to survive the coming flood. This is not a steerable ship, but more like a giant raft that will simply be able to ride the waves. It is a refuge, not a home, and Noah and his family and the animals are the original refugees.

The Torah’s word for ark is tevah, which also means “word.” The Hasidic tradition makes much of this intersection in meaning. The Ba’al Shem Tov comments on God’s instruction to “Noah and all your household” to enter the ark (Genesis 7:1): “This hints that a person must enter into every single word of Torah and prayer with all their strength and all their limbs (‘and all your household’) with self-sacrifice.”

But to me this raises the question: Are Torah and prayer, our sacred words, a refuge or a home? At various points in my life I have found them to be both. In moments of crisis, when it feels like the flood waters are rising and the chaos is swirling, the words of the tradition—along with its melodies and the many other deep layers of association they carry—have certainly provided a refuge, a life raft. But in the more frequent moments when, thank God, I have not been in crisis, I often find Torah and prayer to be homey, spacious, inviting me into conversation and exploration. This is territory I know, a place that feels familiar to me and yet also enables me to grow in wisdom, a place into which I love to invite guests (which is why I write these reflections every week—to invite you inside my home in the text).

At the same time, there can be something a little dangerous in taking all of that for granted. As the conversation with Brad the insurance agent reminded me, perils can happen. Applied to Torah, that can and should provide a check of humility on our self-assurance.

Which leads to another teaching on the same verse. After telling Noah to enter the ark with his household, the Holy One explains, “for you alone have I found righteous before me in this generation.” The Seer of Lublin comments: “If I hear from someone that so-and-so is a tzaddik (righteous person), I do not believe him, for “there is no righteous person on earth” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). And if a miracle occurs and the Holy One comes directly and says to me that I am righteous—like Noah—I will believe the Holy One only for that exact moment. For no person, even a complete tzaddik, is guaranteed what that will be in another moment, or what their nature and form will be then.”

A humbling teaching—and a potentially quite destabilizing one. Peril would seem to lurk all around, in the timeless words of Robert Bringhurst: “only an issue of whether the demons / work from the inside out or from the outside / in: the one / theological question.”

The Maggid of Koznitz puts it slightly differently. In the stories of Cain and Abel, the Generation of the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, “The Holy Blessed One wrote a kind of introduction to the Torah.” Drawing on the Mishnah’s teaching (Avot 4:21) that “Envy, lust, and ego/honor remove a person from the world,” he suggests that these are “stories about the three corrupt character traits—envy, lust, and ego/honor—that a person must uproot from within themselves before approaching the study and fulfillment of the Torah.”

What I find striking about these three negative middot is that they are all part of our internal boundary-making, the calibration of our sense of at-homeness in the world. Envy keeps us from living peacefully with one another. Lust is desire that is so out of control that we can’t channel it properly. And ego/honor (kavod) can lead us to stand on ceremony, to be more concerned with our status and station than with the truth of our lives. All three of these can lead us, God forbid, to wind up abusing others and causing harm to others and ourselves.

When we are in moments of acute distress, we need a refuge—an ark in which to weather the storm. Our Torah and our practices can provide that. But a refuge is, by definition, not meant to be a long-term solution. Living as a refugee, rather than as an image of the divine truly at home, is ultimately unsustainable and corrosive. Strikingly, so is taking home too much for granted. Perils do, in fact lurk. In our lives of Torah and spiritual practice, our aim is to hold all of it lightly, to live at home with ourselves and the memory of our lives as refugees.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When, if ever, have you experienced the words or practices of Torah and Jewish life as a refuge? When have you experienced them as home?

On a fairly regular basis, I engage in a mundane but profound practice of home-making. In these moments, I find I am highly aware of boundaries—what is inside my home territory and what is not. Aware of that boundary, I am also aware of when I may have stepped over the line, when I bend the line or even dissolve it as an act of generosity. And, as I return to my home from this practice, I find myself feeling both refreshed and in need of a glass of water.

I’m talking about mowing the lawn.

Both the eastern and western boundaries of our house are shared with neighbors. While on the southern half of our house the boundaries are demarcated by a fence, on the northern side (the front yard) it’s just grass. Thus, when I mow the lawn in the front, I find myself trying to discern: “Where exactly is the property line here? What’s my responsibility and what is my neighbor’s?” And, I’ll admit, on the occasions when I decide I may as well just cut the little strip of grass between their side of the property line and the cement walkway that runs to the front of their house, I find myself feeling a little self-congratulatory: “Good job, Josh, you generous soul.”

Michael Brooks, who was the longtime Hillel director at the University of Michigan, was a friend and mentor to me and countless others. He passed away a few weeks ago, which caused me to reflect on some of the lessons he taught me. One of them, also recounted by Rabbi Nadav Caine at Michael’s funeral, was, “Most problems are questions of boundaries.”

What did Michael mean? I think it’s that very often the challenges that animate us the most seem to be about deciding whether and how to label something. A mundane example: Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? A more serious one: Who is a Jew? Who is a citizen? How should we categorize AI?

Or is this strip of grass part of my property—my home, in our conventional way of thinking—or my neighbor’s? Where does the boundary of home begin, how do I know when I’ve left it, and how can I know when I’ve returned?

The very first teaching in Tractate Shabbat is actually about this question. The Mishnah there discusses what constitutes an act of carrying between the private and the public domains. Here’s how it illustrates the case: “A poor person stands outside (in the public domain), and the homeowner stands inside (in the private domain).” Whenever there’s an exchange between these two on Shabbat, one of them is carrying an item across the threshold of home—from private to public or vice versa.

How does the Mishnah choose to begin its discussion of Shabbat? Not by talking about rest or food or how to recite kiddush, but by exploring the boundaries of private and public, home and not-home.

I don’t think this is a minor thing, nor is it merely a technical question. The Mishnah is telling us something much deeper, I believe: The essence of Shabbat is being at home, and living with Shabbat consciousness should help us develop a more refined, hopefully more generous, approach to being at home in our lives and the world.

Rashi famously comments on Genesis 2:2: “And God completed on the seventh day… What was the world lacking? Rest (menuchah) came, and the work was finished.” Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv (1824–1898), one of the giants of the Mussar movement, elaborates, first describing the condition of pizur hanefesh, or uncenteredness of the soul, as the ultimate source of sorrow, grief, and misdirection.

He contrasts this with menuchat henefesh, resting of the soul, which is the root of virtue. “This is the dimension of Shabbat,” he writes, “which is a foretaste of the World to Come, bringing all of Creation to fulfillment. For our Sages found no single word to encompass the ultimate fulfillment of Creation other than menuchah.”

When we are spiritually at rest—in a state of menucha, inhabiting Shabbat mind—we are able not to mind boundaries so much. We can stop the constant categorizing of the six days of the workweek (“and God divided… and God named,” the drumbeat of Genesis 1), and instead we can just be with what is. That could be because we feel safe within our limits, enacting the vision of Jeremiah 31:17: v’shavu vanim ligvulam, “your children shall return to their borders.” Safe within our boundaries, we can feel safely at home.

One could argue that there’s a second path to that kind of at-homeness, which is dissolving the boundary altogether. There is much to support that reading, from the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh to the Jewish mystical understanding of Isaiah 6:3, m’lo kol haaretz kvodo, “The entire world is filled with the glory of the Divine.” Yet as much as I aspire to that kind of consciousness, I feel a need—particularly in this week of the anniversary of October 7, when the question of the safety of borders and boundaries, the question of home, was so terrifyingly awakened—to be careful with it.

Cain, the first murderer in human history, is, at first, condemned to a life of homelessness: na va-nad tihyeh ba’aretz, “A ceaseless wanderer will you be upon the earth” (Gen. 4:12). In the next verse he cries out to the Holy One: Gadol avoni minso, “My punishment is too great to bear!” The Kotzker Rebbe comments: “Since the decree of being a vagabond and wanderer was passed upon him, the path to repentance (teshuva) was blocked before him. For as long as he remains a wanderer, his heart-mind will not be with him, and he will be forced to flatter people; thus he will not have the opportunity to serve God and return in complete repentance. Consequently, the punishment itself becomes a cause for further sins, shutting the gates of repentance before him.”

What Cain experienced was, perhaps, something beyond exile. It was complete homelessness, with no possibility of return. That, argues the Kotzker, is more than any human being can live with. In order to survive, we need some notion of a home to return to (lashuv)—someplace in the body, heart, mind, and soul, someplace and sometime in which we can dwell (lashevet) and live securely (Shabbat).

By the end of Parashat Bereshit, the notion of home seems to have become thoroughly debased. If home is a place free from violence, then the fact that the earth was filled with violence (Gen. 6:11) meant that it was rotten to the core. Thus the project of re-creation, which begins with Noah. Why Noah? Rabbi Simcha Zissel answers: “‘Noah found grace’ (Gen. 6:8)—because he was a person of inner stillness (ish menuchah), he found grace.”

As human beings we need to be able to be at home—in time, in space, in spirit. In the Creation story, in Shabbat, in Cain and Abel, in Noah, the Torah opens with a continual exploration of what it might mean to be at home. So, I might add to Michael Brooks’s observation: Our deepest questions are not only about boundaries, but about home.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How do you relate to the notion of boundaries? Do you find you want to be safe inside your own boundary/border? Do you aim to live in a life or a world without boundaries altogether? When do you find one or the other supportive or challenging?

For the last couple of years, it has felt at times that our youngest child, who turns 14 in a few weeks, has needed his own social secretary. Between school and camp, he has attended a veritable parade of coming-of-age celebrations (bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, b-mitzvahs—or as the van of a local non-kosher caterer that nevertheless does a lot of Jewish events puts it a little ironically, “mitzvahs”). There have been stretches of many weeks where he has spent Shabbat at someone else’s home, only to go that evening to a party for another friend in a different community. It’s frankly quite a wonderful problem to have.

These affairs have been a real study in contrast and diversity. Some are pretty modest, with food that’s often homemade and a synagogue social hall that has been decorated by the family. Others have been galas at swanky hotels or event venues, with live bands and fancy hors d’oeuvres. Some are strictly kosher, others make accommodations for kosher-keepers. Some involve mitzvah projects as part of the event, others talk about a project the child-now-adult (sort of) has done on their own time. If the four species of Sukkot (palm, myrtle, willow, and citron) represent diversity, then Toby has had a tour of it over the last two years.

I don’t think it’s just the rabbi in me, nor the career nonprofit professional in me, that finds myself most drawn to those celebrations where the essence is strongest: Where, no matter how stylish and numerous the giveaways may be or how famous the entertainment is or how many people the family was able to employ in putting on the event, what comes through is a sense that this child and this family are living a meaningful, thick, and sacred Jewish life. I hope that Toby and his friends—and, let’s be honest, their parents and grandparents—feel that way too. That, as our friends down the proverbial religion street might say, is the reason for the season.

I wrote recently about Dolly Parton, and her reminder to us that, no matter how much we may acquire materially in life, we can’t take it with us. After what has hopefully been a process of healthily right-sizing ourselves during Elul, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, Sukkot provides us with a physical opportunity to explore and metabolize this lesson further.

Hillel Zeitlin, the great Warsaw teacher of neo-Hasidism, shares the following teaching:

The Sukkah contains many symbols and secrets enumerated in the midrashim and books of kabbalah. But the simplest allusion of all is that we have nothing to rejoice over in our world when we are in a good state, nor is there any reason to be grieved when we derive no pleasure from it. In either case, we are nothing but sojourners here.

So far, so Buddhist. The sukkah, with its nature as a temporary dwelling, invites us to experience and embody impermanence—which can help us liberate ourselves from whatever emotional state we might be in. As the Torah itself states, “You are but strangers and sojourners with Me” (Lev. 25:23).

But Zeitlin continues with something more than impermanence:

There is no sense or purpose to our lives if we have not acquired something good here. To what is this comparable? To a merchant traveling to a fair whose primary concern is not to find a good inn, but rather the merchandise he will purchase there. And if one finds a good inn there, but returns from the fair empty-handed, what does he have to show for the whole fair?

So the goal is not simply to let go, it’s also to acquire—which seems like a paradox. How can you let go of things if you’re trying to acquire things at the same time? The answer, it would seem, is that we want to be acquiring the right goods: not those things that might seem to have greatest material value, but those that are of the greatest spiritual worth—the things, perhaps, that money can’t buy.

Zeitlin concludes the teaching with a story often told about Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, also known as the Chofetz Chaim, the name of his work on mindful speech:

They tell of a certain rabbi, a genius and a tzaddik, whom a passing guest entered to visit in his home, and found no furniture in his house.

The guest asked him: “Rabbi, where is your furniture?” “And where is your furniture?” the Rabbi answered him with a question. “Why, I am merely a guest passing through!” “And I, too, am merely a guest here,” the Rabbi answered him.

Sukkot is an exercise in recalibrating our sense of at-homeness. “All seven days of Sukkot,” says the Mishnah, “one should make one’s sukkah their permanent dwelling, and make their house their temporary dwelling” (Sukkah 2:9). If home is a place in which we feel powerful, into which we can invite guests, then Zeitlin’s teaching about the Chofetz Chaim invites us to ask, What is it to be at home in a world in which we are already fundamentally guests to begin with?

That, of course, is not only a question for Sukkot. But the holiday is a time when we are invited and challenged to enter it deeply. So, this Sukkot, what illusions about our permanence are we holding onto that it’s time to let go? What truths about our own impermanence do we ignore that it’s time to take up? And how can we live as guests in this world while helping all to feel welcome and at home?